Getting Started with ES6

The new JavaScript - ES6. It's cool.

Posted on May 06, 2016

Being in tech is overwhelming at times. There is always scope to learn more and if you are not able to keep up with the industry, you are going to be left behind at some point. There are so many new languages, frameworks, workflows and techniques coming out every day that it is hard to keep up. But to stay relevant in your area it is important to see the trend and prepare yourself for the future.

One particular area where I have seen this trend in the past few years is in the JavaScript world. This last decade has seen so mch change in the JavaScript world more than in any other platform. Right from the creation of jQuery to frameworks like Angular, React and Vue, JavaScript has been growing in leaps and bounds.

JavaScript is cool

Let’s admit it. The world seems to be taken over by JavaScript in the past few years. Every other day there is a “cool” new framework coming out and there is a lot of developments happening in the JavaScript space. So if you are anything like me, following the tech community, you would’ve come across the term ECMAScript, particularly ES6 or ES2015.

JavaScript is a language that has really progressed in the last few years. So what is all this hype around ES6? What is it got to do with JavaScript? Should you learn JavaScript or ECMAScript?

I am writing this post to give a brief intro to ES6 and some of its features and by no means is this a complete guide. There are excellent resources on the internet to learn ES6. My intention is to get the reader excited to at least go and explore ES6 for a bit.

ECMAScript?

JavaScript core features are defined using ECMA standard. The language defined in the standard is called ECMAScript. JavaScript and Node.js are basically implementation or supersets of ECMAScript. ECMAScript 6 reached it feature complete status in the year 2015. Hence the name ES2015. But they are both the same. Feel free to refer them anyway you need but we’ll go by ES6.

Using it today

As of today, the browsers and Nodejs community are actively moving towards providing ES6 support. The latest edition of Chrome supports almost 95% of all ES6 features. Due to this inconsistency amongst browsers, often ES6 code needs to be transformed into vanilla (ES5) JavaScript to be able to run across all browsers. Strictly speaking, the term transpiling seems to be more appropriate as the process is transformation of a version of JS to it’s lower version to ensure support and there is no actual compilation going on.

There are various transpilers in the market today like Traceur.js, Babel.js. Babel (previously called 6to5) is a popular transpiler. Using Babel, you can use all of ES6 features without worrying about browser support. You just link to the transpiled version of your JavaScript to your app and you are good to go. Let’s take a look into setting up Babel. Feel free to look into Babel documentation as they have support for almost all of the build processes like Gulp, Grunt etc.

Now if you are not a fan of these build processes and command line stuff, there are GUI alternatives like Prepros which works well and compiling/transpiling is much simpler. We will briefly touch upon both using Babel and Prepros.

Using Babel

To start using Babel for your projects, within your project folder create a package.json file. This file holds various metadata relevant to the project and is used to give information to Node Package Manager (npm) that allows it to identify the project as well as handle the project’s dependencies. Using the command line way of installing Babel, type the following into your terminal window:

Now, instead of running Babel from command line we can simply run the following command from the terminal and get the transpiling done. Note that the source and destination directories, in this case src and build respectively are specified as the parameters:

~ $ npm run build

One thing to note here is that Babel comes with a number of transformations and not just ES6 transformations. Before Babel 6 was released, the transformation to ES6 (ES2015) was included by default. But from Babel 6, you need to be explicit about the transformations that need to be included. This si done by including presets. ES6 transformation can be included by adding the es2015 preset like follows:

~ $ npm install babel-preset-es2015 --save-dev

Alternatively you can add a babelrc file to your project root and include the plugins there as follows:

echo'{ "presets": ["es2015"] }'> .babelrc

Once this is setup, all you need to do it to link the output js file to your app to use all the ES6 goodness.

Using Prepros

Prepos is a wonderful GUI application that eases the build process by doing various compilation and preprocessing tasks. As per their website, it is a tool to compile LESS, Sass, Compass, Stylus, Jade and much more with automatic CSS prefixing, It comes with built in server for cross browser testing. Built using Github’s Electron framework, the same thing that powers VSCode and Atom editor, Prepros provides a sleek UI. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. So it is a cross platform tool and I have tried it and it is wonderful.

Prepros is free for evaluation without time limits but continued use should be by purchasing a license to support the developer. Using it is pretty straight forward. You open the project in Prepros by dragging your project folder into it or by opening through the menu. Once your project is added, you’ll be able to see the files as follows:

When you select your source JavaScript file, you’ll have an options pane towards the right where you can set the destination folder, auto compile (compile on file content change), uglify (minifying the js), convert ES6 to ES5 (which is what we need) etc. This is all taken care through the user interface. This is why this is a handy tool to have in your arsenal.

Once you have set this up, you are ready to write some ES6! Let’s move on.

Syntax

After you have the transpiler setup, you can write code like you would normally do with an object oriented language. But this is only one of the cool things. There are more!

'use strict';var_createClass=function(){functiondefineProperties(target,props){for(vari=0;i<props.length;i++){vardescriptor=props[i];descriptor.enumerable=descriptor.enumerable||false;descriptor.configurable=true;if("value"indescriptor)descriptor.writable=true;Object.defineProperty(target,descriptor.key,descriptor);}}returnfunction(Constructor,protoProps,staticProps){if(protoProps)defineProperties(Constructor.prototype,protoProps);if(staticProps)defineProperties(Constructor,staticProps);returnConstructor;};}();function_classCallCheck(instance,Constructor){if(!(instanceinstanceofConstructor)){thrownewTypeError("Cannot call a class as a function");}}varCar=function(){functionCar(name){_classCallCheck(this,Car);this.name=name;}_createClass(Car,[{key:'start',value:functionstart(){returnthis.name+' started';}}]);returnCar;}();console.log(newCar('Aston Martin').greet());

Looks scary? Don’t worry about it, that is for your browser to read and understand, for you it is a very familiar class syntax which is similar to languages like C++, PHP etc.

Bit about the language

Now that we have a little insight into what ES6 has to offer, let’s look a little bit more into the what is new in ES6. As I mentioned earlier, we will just skim the surface and not go into details. Towards the end I shall link to sources from where you can goo deeper in learning ES6.

Variable declaration (let and const)

If you come from JavaScript world the variable declaration using var keyword would be pretty familiar. In ES6, there are two additional keywords for variable declaration:

let

const

To understand why we have these additional keywords, let’s take a little detour and look into a something special that JavaScript does called Variable Hoisting.

Variable hoisting

Nothing new there, a straight forward bit of code. when the function executes, if start is true, then the variable state is assigned a value of "Vehicle started". Else the function returns null. Now let’s assume, we uncomment the line console.log(state) within the else block thereby logging the variable state to the console. In this case what would be the output?

> undefined

You would expect the console to throw up a reference error since the else block should not have access to the state variable. The declaration happens within the if condition, but the variable is accessible within else condition, but just that the value is undefined. How can this happen?

This is a little confusing until you understand the concept of hoisting. Hoisting in JavaScript means that the declaration of the variable, in our case state is hoisted to the top, while the initialization remains within if clause. To make this more clear, here is what happens behind the scenes:

As you can see, JavaScript pulls up the variable and declares it on the top. This is called hoisting. Actually this is the reason why it is considered a best practice to declare your variables at the top.

To avoid this confusion around hoisting, block level declarations were created in ES6. Block level declarations are those where variables that are inaccessible outside of a given block scope. Block scopes, also called lexical scopes, are created within a function or inside of a block like an if else statement.

Let’s take the same example as above and use let instead of var.

functiononKey(start){if(start){letstate="Vehicle started";// scope is within if blockreturnstate;}else{console.log(state);// throws ReferenceErrorreturnnull;}}

Using let keyword, keeps the scope of the variable state restricted within the if block and does not hoist it to the top. Also using let keyword prevents re-declaration. Within the same scope, if a variable is re-declared, let throws an error.

varstep=4;// initial declaration of stepletstep=5;// this will throw an error as step is being re-declaredif(something){letstep=5;// this won't cause error as it is within scope of `if` }

So at this point in time, if you are already into ES6, there is no need to have var in your code. You can use either let or const for all your variable declarations. Now that we mentioned it, let’s look at const.

The const keyword is different from the let keyword in a way that it is used to declare constants and need to be initialized. A constant value cannot be changed anywhere within the same scope. Similar to let declarations a const value is not hoisted.

This might sound like const is immutable. In a sense yes, but that being said, a const declaration only prevents modification of the binding and not of the value itself. What this means is that const declarations for objects do not prevent modification of the objects.

conststep=4;// step is assigned a value 4step=5;// error as const cannot be changedconstage;// error, as const needs to be initialised// when applied to objectsconstcar={make:"Aston Martin"};car={make:"Jaguar"// error};car.make="Mesarati";// works fine

The binding car is created with an initial value of an object with a property, but car.name can be changed without causing an error because this changes what car contains and doesn’t change bound value of car. Any attempts to assign a value to car which in turn changes the binding, will result in an error. This a bit confusing but the fact is that const only prevents modification of the binding, not modification of the bound value. It just means that the variable cannot be reassigned to something else.

All this being said, immutability can be forced as follows:

constcar=Object.freeze([...]);

A variable declared using var or const cannot be accessed until after the declaration. If not, they result in reference errors. Remember, hoisting doesn’t happen here.

Some more cool stuff

ES6 should have some more tricks up it’s sleeve shouldn’t it? Being new and all? Oh yeah it does. I am not gonna be able to go into all of those, but will pick up few cool ones. You are going to love these if you are serious about JavaScript

1. Arrow Operator

Seen this guy? => Yeah the arrow operator. Nothing new I presume? You might think, but this guy is really cool in ES6. How? Let’s see. Take the following code snippet for example:

letgetter=function(value){returnvalue;};

The same expression can be ES6 using arrow operator. Arrow operator helps in reducing an expression to a much simpler form. Using arrow syntax, the above code can be reproduced as:

letgetter=value=>value;

Brain exploded? How cool is that? All your function keyword, parenthesis () and braces {} are out of the window. Let’s look at a slightly more complex example.

2. Destructuring

One of the coolest things that ES6 offers is something called destructuring. If you are someone who works a lot in objects and arrays, you are going to love this. Since JSON has become a big thing, object and array literals have become most important in the language. Pulling data from these structures is very common practice in any JavaScript app. Let’s look at the following example:

letcar={make:'Jaguar',power:'300hp',topSpeed:320}let{make,topSpeed}=car;// assigning the variables to objectconsole.log("The "+make+" goes at "+topSpeed);

See the magic? The variable was automatically assigned the value from the object. Same code in ES5 will be like so:

See the ease? Number of lines of code that you save. If nothing, see how clean the syntax is? Go back and read what’s written in the banner image again!

3. Template literals

Template strings or template literals are cool like everything else with ES6. This is really helpful in scenarios where you want to insert an HTML snippet withing JavaScript and render it out dynamically. Traditionally, to do this, you would’ve done something like this:

// as stringsvarsnippet='<div class="fun">'+'<p>Inside of Div</p>'+'</div>';// with a dynamic valuevarvalue="Inside of div";varsnippet='<div class="fun">'+'<p>'+value+'</p>'+'</div>';// as arrayvarsnippet=['<div class="fun">','<p>Inside of Div</p>','</div>'].join('');

Not to exaggerate, but this a was a big pain! And your code looked like some kind of soup. But with template literals, this can be way simpler and cleaner. Even inserting dynamic values are painless as shown below:

Few of the JavaScript frameworks like React and Vue use templating for rendering components. This feature is further supplemented by having template literals as a feature in ES6.

4. Rest and spread

There are instances where you do not know exactly how many arguments you need to accept. You might want a function where you can accept any number of arguments. This is where the concept of Rest comes and helps you out. note that rest here does not mean the traditional restful services type thing. This is what it means:

Rest

In the above example, the function sum() accepts three arguments and when you supply three numbers, it returns the sum. Now imagine you need sum of four numbers. You cannot use the same function as it takes in only three arguments. Now look at the following:

// function to add numbersfunctionsum(...numbers){returnnumbers.reduce(function(previous,current){returnprevious+current;});}sum(1,2,3,4)// result = 10// same as above but using arrow syntaxfunctionsum(...numbers){returnnumbers.reduce((previous,current)=>previous+current;);}sum(1,2,3,4)// result = 10

In the above example we make use of reduce, which is a higher order function in JavaScript. You can read more about higher order functions here. Leaving that aside, see how we used the rest operator with the numbers variable ...numbers.

One thing to note here tough, in case of multiple arguments, the Rest operator should always come towards the end like function sum(arg, ...numbers) {}. So it translates to arg and the rest of it.

Spread

The Spread operator kind of does the opposite of Rest operator. If we go back to our first example of the sum() function, the spread operator takes the array and converts each array item into separate arguments.

So when the Rest operator helps in splitting any sequence of operators into an array, the spread operator splits an array into arguments.

5. Default arguments

ES6 provides support for default parameters which is already a feature in languages like PHP. If a function is declared with a default fallback value for the argument, during the function call if there are no arguments supplied to the function, it simply returns the default value specified. The following example clarifies this concept.

// function to get rating in ES5 wayfunctiongetRating(rating){rating=rating||10;// ES5 way of applying default value.returnrating;}// getRating in ES6functiongetRating(rating=10){returnrating;}console.log(getRating(100));// return value 100console.log(getRating());// return value 10 since no argument is supplied

In the ES5 way of applying default, we use an || (OR operator) to assign a default value to rating. But in the ES6 way, this default value can be supplied within the arguments as shown above.

The function getRating() takes an argument which is assigned a default value of 10. In the first instance of console.log(getRating(100)), we supply a value of 100 as an argument and hence 100 is returned during the function call. In the second call, console.log(getRating()), we do not supply any argument, so the value returned falls back to the default provided during function definition.

Conclusion

So, these are the few wonderful things that ES6 gives you. If you are not impressed, then I don’t know what will impress you. With all this awesome changes to JavaScript, now is the right time to go and learn ES6 and start building things with it. What I have given here is just a scratch on the surface of the vast world of ES6.

There are numerous resources like these on the internet which will give you a head-start to begin with ES6. Go and give it a try, you’ll love it. I did.

I am a podcaster, software engineer, blogger and coffee lover as you can see from my Instagram. This is my blog where I post stuff related to web technologies, podcasting and life in general. I co-host a podcast at Writer & Geek Show and I write some articles about life. More about me here.

Vishnu Padmanabhan

I enjoy living. I try to see positivity in everything. Sarcastic most of the time and researching for my podcast the rest. Love music and cannot live without it, did I say I love food?

This blog, its content and opinions are my own and does not reflect the opinions of my employer.